U.S.-based employers cut over 440,000 jobs in the first half of 2026, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The vast majority of those departing workers will not receive the kind of individual career coaching and job-search support traditionally associated with outplacement.
Traditional outplacement is a high-touch service employers purchase for workers who are being laid off. Historically, it has been delivered through a hands-on relationship with a human career expert who works directly with the employee on résumé and LinkedIn positioning, job-search strategy, networking, and interview preparation.
That level of support is expensive and usually tiered by seniority. Executives may receive months of individualized coaching, while lower-level employees usually get nothing at all. The model was built around human time, which made it difficult to extend meaningful support across a large workforce reduction.
Pelgo, a career-transition startup founded by former Boxed CEO Chieh Huang and former Cognizant CEO Francisco D’Souza, is an example of new technology disrupting an established category by sharply lowering the price and expanding the potential customer base. The company raised $5.5 million in a pre-seed round before emerging from stealth in February, and Huang said its clients have used the service to support offboarding in seven countries across four continents.
Layoffs can produce a surge of questions from departing employees. Pelgo is intended to serve as a first line of support, answering routine questions about COBRA, retirement accounts, severance, and benefits while routing individual or sensitive cases to an HR representative.
For exiting workers, the platform compares their résumés with available positions, identifies relevant experience, suggests how that experience should be emphasized, and flags skills they do not have. It also provides AI agents that help workers find and apply to jobs.
Pelgo’s basic service starts at $20 per departing employee per month, although there are more expensive options that include access to a human coach.
It is too early to know whether Pelgo’s AI-based outplacement services will deliver meaningful results for laid-off employees, but the price makes outplacement feasible for employee groups its clients would not have supported before.
“There’s no coffee shop on earth that would provide [a barista] with a $2,000 outplacement service,” Huang said. “But if it’s 20 bucks, they start to think, ‘Well, this person did really well for us.’”
